Nifty addition to treeherder

At work I just found out we have a nice change in Treeherder, the tool that monitors current Firefox (and other) builds. Without writing my usual 10 pages of explanation and backstory, I’ll just say that Treeherder shows whether the release engineering infrastructure has started the release promotion process to take the builds from the changeset specified and do some super mystery magic on them to make them suitable for actual release to Firefox users. We get an email from the notification system that this happened, but now we can follow along in the same tool we use to watch tests pass or fail.

In this case, I used a different tool (Ship-It) to set up the parameters to take the test builds for the 1a24837f9ed232d8d2dc4535d11ee53c9847b109 changeset (say it 6 times, fast) for Firefox 59 beta 7 (plus the android and developer edition versions) and declare us ready to kick off this process. Instead of checking email notifications that only go to a particular mailing list, or diving straight into TaskCluster, I can see that near the end of the enormous list of automated tests running on various platforms, “Gecko Decision Task”. This tells us that the builds are now being “promoted”. I haven’t tried drilling deeper yet, but if you click on any of the links there (such as “promote_firefox”) then you get even more detail, including links to TaskCluster and its myriad, confusing joys.

As usual, I think it’s damn cool that all this happens “in the open” at Mozilla, so you don’t even have to be logged into anything to see quite a lot of detail. Anyone with an interest can learn a lot here, or even get involved and contribute, because of this level of commitment to transparency. It’s a good way to find out if you like the work, or to get work experience that you can easily show off in the future.